Meggie Royer

October 2025 | fiction, Pushcart nominee

Crawlspace

Veronica opened the paper bag of tomatoes, inhaling their earthy scent. Big Rainbow, Early Girl, Jubilee. Her favorite, heirlooms, were stacked at the bottom. They always had such beautiful cross-sections. Outside the window, a trail of birdseed stretched to the banks of the creek, raspberries clustered in rows along the hill. A thunderstorm was building at the horizon, clouds so dark she estimated ten more minutes before the rain fell.

A man cleared his throat behind her. Veronica jumped, dropping the lone Brandywine on the floor. She braced for it to erupt, but it landed with a dull thud and a minor leakage of seeds. Grabbing the tomato, she dusted it with her shirt. Jonah was back from errands. “Sandwiches?” he asked. “Sandwiches,” Veronica answered. They worked in a team, slicing the rye and the bulbous red fruit, spooning wads of mustard onto the bread. As they added their finishing touches, the clouds burst, emptying into the creek. This was good, Veronica thought. It had been so dry, and the animals needed the water.

As they ate, Jonah fiddled with a chisel he’d left on the table. Blue rust spanned its length like moss. “What’s up?” Veronica queried. “Nothing,” Jonah said. “Just, you know. Long day.” Veronica nodded. One of the goats had wandered to the door in the storm and was battering its horns against the wood. Rolling her eyes, Veronica shooed it from the entryway and back out into the yard.

As she turned back to the kitchen, Jonah was nowhere to be seen. His plate lay empty in the sink, save for a thick stream of red juice. The goat attacked the door again, incessantly now, as if timing its pummeling with the thunder.

Curious, Veronica climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Maybe Jonah had laid down for a nap. As she reached the landing, she startled. The hidden door to the crawlspace was open, its darkness a still column. Jonah looked up at her with a terror so naked she nearly felt a brief current of remorse pass through. The body inside was partitioned perfectly, limbs stacked in neat rows. Veronica thought of the tomatoes. Sighing, she lifted the chisel from her side and slowly positioned it in front of her chest. A floor below, some of the cattle had joined the goat, hooves striking the floor in tandem. With her eyes closed, Veronica could almost imagine the sound of applause.

 

Meggie Royer

Meggie Royer (she/her) is a Midwestern writer and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persephone’s Daughters, a journal for abuse survivors. She has won numerous awards and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in The San Antonio Review, The Rumpus, The Minnesota Review, and other notable publications. She thinks there is nothing better in this world than a finished poem. Her work can be found at https://meggieroyer.com/.

Michelle Morouse

October 2025 | fiction

St. Mary’s Call Room 403

Dr. G. laughed when colleagues refused to sleep in call room 403. The 4 East wing of St. Mary’s once housed pediatrics, then orthopedics, then maternity. They said people had heard things in 403—the rattling of long-gone nuns’ rosaries, a woman crying for her baby…

She didn’t believe in ghosts. Even if they were real, couldn’t someone have died in every room of the hospital? Didn’t every call room look haunted? They stank of old dust and bleach, with a sweet, roach powder undertone, and the shower stall curtains were stained with orange mold.

Dr. G. seldom got a chance to sleep, but she’d volunteer to take Room 403 when she was on. When she did make it to the call room, she’d fall exhausted into a REM sleep. She dreamt of doing CPR on her favorite patient as a student, kneeling on the edge of the bed for leverage, feeling a rib crack under her hands. She dreamt about willing her hands to stop shaking the first time she did a spinal tap: slow, full, damp breaths under her mask. She dreamt of standing in surgery in her third year of medical school, two months post-partum, breast milk leaking through her gown. She dreamt of the plastic surgeon who teased her because her left eye was lower than her right, something she’d never noticed. He said it in front of the nurses, “Easy fix. Botox.” As if she had time for that.

Dr. G did a lot of night shifts, with one colleague on maternity leave, and another recovering from surgery. The more she worked, the further she fell behind in her own life, even forgetting her own wedding anniversary. She was overdue for doctor’s appointments, her mammogram, and her routine colonoscopy.

The dreams worsened: an elderly man in a lower body cast, who shook his fist, “We routed the Kaiser!” then clenched his chest, and a girl with stringy blond hair, dark circles under her eyes. She thought about trying a different call room but discarded the notion as silly. She was just overworked.

One night, Dr. G admitted ninety-five-year-old Sister St. Catherine. “I ran old 4 East. I loved maternity, except when we lost a baby.”

Dr. G. did get some sleep that night, but at 2 a.m. she awoke, and found herself staring at a woman whose left eye was lower than her right.

The woman was thin. Too thin. Bald.

 

Michelle Morouse

Michelle Morouse’s work has appeared previously in Burningword and in various journals, including Third Wednesday, Vestal Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Gemini, Midwest Review, Prose Online, Bending Genres, Best Microfiction, The MacGuffin, and Unbroken. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. @michellemorouse.bsky.social

Jim Ross

October 2025 | visual art

Can You Help My Cat and Dog Live in Peace?, by Jim Ross

Can You Help My Cat and Dog Live in Peace?

 

Jim Ross

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in nine years, he has published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid works, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Invisible City, Orion, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include DASH, Kestrel, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage, Sweet, and Typehouse. Recently nominated for Best of the Net in Nonfiction and Art, he also wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.

Kaitlyn Owens

October 2025 | poetry

Vanishing

I wish I didn’t cry at creeping vines

forming on bungalows, at bus station

lost and found receipts and forgotten gloves.

At the 60s spirits smoking Pall Malls

in my living room on Sundays evenings

in February when the heat kicks on.

Old dogs and moth-bitten baby photos,

worn-in recliners and class reunions

and lightning bugs in clear jars with the tops

punched out, a useless extension of life.

 

At the fire breather and the firefighter

holding hands on the Zipper at the county fair.

At stamps collections and scrapbooks at the Goodwill

and the certainty of sunflowers, heads seeking

what scorches them, their devotion unwavering

even after the evening sky dims to navy.

 

These weren’t my riddle to solve but they weren’t clues either,

just Faberge eggs behind glass at a museum,

public presents originating from a Russian tsar

who also fell victim to a vivacious magician

performing sleight-of-hand tricks with white rabbits and quarters.

 

At the tsar and rabbits and quarters.

At how they disappeared.

 

Kaitlyn Owens

Kaitlyn Owens writes poetry about the inheritances we carry—family patterns unseen on medical forms yet shaping us deeply. Her work has appeared in Fjords Review and Novus Literary Arts Journal, and she has received an International Merit Award from The Atlanta Review. A product manager by day and a restorer of old things by night, she believes in naming truths, however complicated. Visit her at www.kaitlynowens.squarespace.com.

Alice Lowe

October 2025 | nonfiction

Last Dance

Take politicians, for example. Some know when to bow out gracefully; others hang on doggedly, even after their health, energy, and mental acuity have begun to compromise their effectiveness. (Sorry, Joe, that includes you.) The time of reckoning seems to hover around the age of 80. Some still claim good health and all their marbles and see no reason not to keep going. Bernie at 83 and Nancy at 85—still fighting the good fight. Others may yearn for the calm and quiet of private life, be ready to retire from the rat race.

I ran my last half marathon at 80, my last 10K a year later. My race times were still good, my legs still strong, but I didn’t want to wait for something to go wrong. It was time, and I’ve had no doubts, no regrets. A friend is going strong at 84, and runners in their 80s are still clocking the miles and crossing the finish line at the Boston Marathon every year. I cheer their successes but don’t yearn to be among them.

There’s no retirement age for writers, no urgency that might compel them to stop. Alice Munro and Philip Roth called it quits at around 80, though I’ll bet both could have kept producing quality work if they’d chosen to. Like Margaret Atwood, her creativity and energy seemingly boundless at 85. My friend Priscilla Long published a book about creativity in old age at 79, her fifth book since turning seventy, and said that she had plans for ten more.

Age isn’t the determining factor, but here I am at 81 wondering if it’s time to throw in the towel. I’m in excellent health, can still wield a pencil, type fast, read fine print on paper and screen. Yet writing has become a struggle. I moan to friends: the well is dry. Dredging and pumping yield nothing. Is it temporary or permanent? Have I said all I want to say?

A wise friend advises, “Don’t stay too long at the dance when you feel there is no dance left in you.” But how do you recognize that feeling? I’ve kicked off my dancing shoes, and I enjoy sitting it out, watching and listening from my seat on the sidelines. Maybe this is it; maybe I’m done. But then I pick up a beat … I start tapping my toes … my body sways with the rhythm. Maybe once more around the floor?

 

Alice Lowe

Alice Lowe’s flash nonfiction has been published this past year in Broken Teacup, Bluebird Word, Masque & Spectacle, Painted Pebble Lit Mag, Skipjack Review, In Short, Drifting Sands, and Burningword. She has been twice cited in Best American Essays. Alice writes about life, literature, food, and family in San Diego, California. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com